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Last year, I did myself a favour. I wrote — and posted publicly — a reminder about what May is like. Then I created a reminder in my calendar that I should a) read the post and b) that my loved ones know why I'd be incommunicado for the month of May. The reminder arrived as clockwork on April 1st.

I promptly snoozed it repeatedly until the end of last week. Oops.

As I apparently can't be relied upon to follow simple directions (even my own), I am herewith putting it out there in public again. If I disappear a bit over the next month, now you know why.

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I have a love-hate
relationship with May. May is the month when
the world comes back to life, when it’s 99% sure it won’t snow again for months,
when grey and brown makes room for shades of green and when it finally and at
last becomes warm enough to take off my socks and set my toes free after a
winter of being trapped.

What’s not to love?

May, however, is also
Arthritis Awareness Month in the US. I work for the RA site of H…

April means Easter and Easter means a visit by the Tinks. This year, it also meant celebrating my mother's birthday. Well, the first celebration. We are waiting with the grand shindig for when she is fully recovered from her hip replacement surgery. Instead, we did the quiet family
celebration at my mother’s. With the combo celebration of the holiday and
birthday, there was a lot of chocolate. The Boy imitated the Easter Bunny making a
home delivery of just about the cutest Easter baskets I had ever seen in my
life. Naturally, I had to get them for the kids. My only regret was that I got
the last two and I couldn’t buy one for everyone.

Can you believe how big they've grown? Wasn't it just last week they looked like this?

There was presents and cards and
bubblewrap. The photos involving the latter were all a blur of popping and play
fights, so I’m sticking to the slower activity of opening a card As usual, mos…

I’m a lucky woman for
many reasons and one of them is that mor is not just my mother, but my friend,
too.

Which is not to say that
her friendship has been more important than her mothering. In fact, I think she’s
pretty much the perfect mother. Even when I was little, she encouraged me to
think for myself and to be part of decisions as much as possible. I may not
have always gotten what I wanted, but my opinion was always considered. This
was really important as a child growing up with a chronic illness — a situation
where a lot of control is taken away from you. I don’t think she originally
emphasized independence because of my RA, but I’m sure that enhanced her
approach to parenting. My mother has always been a very independent person
herself, approaching life with curiosity and no fear and encouraging Janne and
myself to do the same. I grew up hearing stories of her childhood and her
adventures. One of the quintessential mor stories is that time she climbed a
radio tower and once she…